June 23, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:23:44
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, people, we are live on YouTube and the Facebook, and we have a last-minute booking here at The Rubin Report. | ||
| Mr. Majid Nawaz has joined us live in studio. | ||
| We're meeting for the first time, I can't believe it. | ||
| Well, I was just saying to you, Dave, that I remember being your second ever interview. | ||
| I think the order went Sam, me, and then Ayaan. | ||
| Close enough. | ||
| And then your show kicked off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd like to take the credit being in the middle there for some of the early days of your success. | ||
| But kidding aside, it's a pleasure to finally meet you. | ||
| Yeah, well it's a pleasure to sit here with you, but I am going to give you credit for something because people You constantly credit me with coming up with the phrase of regressive left. | ||
| Yeah, can we get that one cleared up? | ||
| I want to make this clear. | ||
| I say it constantly. | ||
| Guys, yes, I don't popularize it obviously, but I want to be very clear looking directly in your eyes. | ||
| You were the one who came up with the phrase regressive left. | ||
| Yeah, for my sins. | ||
| It's in my autobiography, Radical, from 2012. | ||
| I kind of started using it around 2011. | ||
| You can look at these things, search online. | ||
| There's a reference to regressive before that, of course, because that's a word in the English language. | ||
| There is no reference to the word in the construct regressive left used in the way it's used here to describe precisely what we're trying to describe and that is cultural relativism as deployed by those who call themselves left wing and weaponized against those who are attempting to challenge cultural relativism within the left wing and that specific reference to that meaning I don't think existed before I used it in that way in Radical, but again, the concept existed. | ||
| And so I wouldn't take credit for inventing the idea. | ||
| How important are words in this way? | ||
| Because we're gonna talk about a lot of words, and we're gonna talk about some definitions between Islamist and Jihadist, and all of the things that obviously you're talking about all the time. | ||
| But do you find that phrase, regressive left, to me, the reason I used it a lot was because people had these thoughts. | ||
| They were realizing something was wrong with the so-called liberals, and the phrase, it just worked. | ||
| And it really showed me the power of words when you're discussing things like this. | ||
| Dave, the power of words is something which, I've been into, as people who know my story would know, | ||
| I've been into hip hop from around the age of 12, 11 onwards. | ||
| And that first taught me the power of words. | ||
| And in fact, we're in the West Coast, right? | ||
| So N.W.A., coming straight from L.A. | ||
| and from Compton. | ||
| In fact, straight out, Compton was what it was called. | ||
| We're Compton adjacent right now. | ||
| And the power of those words in defiance at, you know, F the police. | ||
| I mean fuck the police was the track that I really got into at the age of around 13 and it spoke to me in such a powerful way because it was in those days times and I was being arrested and harassed by the Essex police authorities eventually ended up being arrested at gunpoint by them profiling all that sort of stuff so I learned from an early age That words and articulating our words in a precise and concise way can be so powerful in bringing meaningful change. | ||
| So, there is sometimes a danger of overusing regressive left, but there's a concept that I, after leaving and fast-forwarding now, after leaving my former Islamist group, Hezbollah Tahrir, Which only reinforced, by the way, my stint in Hizb ut-Tahrir only reinforced in me the power of words and the power of correct articulation of concepts for the purposes of spreading ideas. | ||
| So that only reinforced it. | ||
| Because they were using certain words in a way? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Islamists are very well aware of the power of words. | ||
| Especially in what they call Dawah, which is proselytization, and the importance of words in Dawah and proselytization, even theologically, is grounded, what I often distinguish between Islamism and Islam, and we can come to that, even religiously, not just for Islamists, but the power of words is recognized in the Islamic religion for the importance of Dawah or proselytization. | ||
| It's something which anyone who's got a message to get across is going to need to understand. | ||
| So after leaving Hizb ut-Tahrir, I came across this idea that was used during the Cold War. | ||
| And it's called semantic infiltration. | ||
| And it was all about not allowing for your enemy's propaganda to infiltrate your language so that you begin having a conversation on their terms of reference. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| This is fascinating because I see a lot of this right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's called semantic infiltration. | ||
| And it's a danger to allow that to happen. | ||
| So to give you an example of that in a field that we're familiar with. | ||
| So Islamists In one sentence, a definition for that. | ||
| Those who want to impose a version of Islam over society, which is commonly known as theocracy, but a Muslim version of that theocracy, let's call it Islamism, or we can get to the wisdom of these terms, what is the difference between Islamism and fundamentalist Islam and all of that, we can get to that. | ||
| But Islamists believe that their view on Islam, i.e. | ||
| that it must be enforced on everybody, first off in Muslim majority societies and then in the rest of the world, they believe that is Islam. | ||
| And they believe therefore, by definition, they speak for Islam and Muslims. | ||
| So when they speak, they speak in that way, and they say the Islamic ruling of, or for, you know, whatever, a caliphate is this, X, Y, and Z. Now, the danger is that if we're attempting to isolate Muslims, Islam is from everyday, ordinary Muslims, If an Islamist is claiming to speak as a representative of what Islam is and monopolizing that definition of Islam, the danger with semantic infiltration here is a concept that first arose, as I said, with the USSR. | ||
| In America, they were concerned about adopting communist language and communist terms of reference when trying to undermine communist propaganda. | ||
| You've already ceded the ground, right? | ||
| So if then, when an Islamist says, this is what Islam says, if we then accept that, The phrase nominal I don't really like. | ||
| and begin engaging in that conversation on their terms of reference, | ||
| we've already ceded the ground. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that language is crucial. | ||
| So that puts the nominal, the phrase nominal I don't really like. | ||
| People say the nominal Muslim, and there's something that I think is. | ||
| is not quite appropriate about that. | ||
| But the average person who of course is as peaceful and freedom loving and just wants to have a job | ||
| and a family and food and all of the things that everyone else in the West wants, | ||
| I feel like that puts them in a really tough spot, right? | ||
| Because then they're hearing the Islamists taking their beliefs, their belief system. | ||
| Then they have to deal with the left that's usually ignoring them or worse than ignoring them. | ||
| What do you think it's like for the, is nominal, do you have a better word? | ||
| I don't like the word nominal. | ||
| Yeah, so you know, nominal would suggest that it's not a serious commitment. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So I just talk about mainstream, and the mainstream, that doesn't mean they're liberal or left-wing or right-wing, it just means the ordinary everyday person. | ||
| The way anyone else would have a faith. | ||
| Okay, so for the mainstream Muslim, Not someone like you who's out there, very outspoken. | ||
| I'm a fringe. | ||
| I don't deny that, by the way. | ||
| My views are not representative. | ||
| I don't claim to be a representative of Muslims. | ||
| I don't claim to speak on behalf of Islam, and I'm not devout. | ||
| And my liberalism, and my outspoken liberal views, and my universal liberalism, and call for humanism, and all of that, currently, it is not a mainstream popular voice from within Muslim communities. | ||
| But then, there wouldn't be a need for change if it was. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And ironically, your calls for liberalism, which I want to get into because I've heard you talk about classical liberalism as clear as anyone else that I've heard. | ||
| Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be taking root too much either for you guys or for us here in the States. | ||
| But for the mainstream Muslim, What do you think it's like for the average mainstream Muslim right now that is just caught between us? | ||
| Because I think there's so many, for those of us that care about this, we're trying to extend a hand. | ||
| We're then getting hit by the people that want to slander and lie to us. | ||
| You just had to deal with something on BBC, which we'll talk about. | ||
| I've had some stuff lately. | ||
| What do you think just for that average person that's just trying to live? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, look, this is my family. | ||
| This is a community from which I was, into which I was born and from which I come. | ||
| So I can speak from personal experience. | ||
| I can speak from everything I see in this community. | ||
| And I can tell you the pressures are enormous. | ||
| That doesn't justify some of the shortcomings because of course with enormous pressures and with enormous, when the consequences are so big, certain things are unavoidable, certain positions must be taken and so I'm critical of not enough being done and more needing to be done. | ||
| But I can concede immediately the pressures are enormous and those pressures Sometimes lead to responses that must be contextualized when understanding how enormous the pressures are. | ||
| People, effectively, let's always remember one thing. | ||
| We are talking of a minority community. | ||
| And because it's a minority community, they're scared. | ||
| They are scared that mainstream wider society will turn against them. | ||
| And of course, Western civilization, European history especially, has precedence for that happening. | ||
| Let's also not forget that unlike in the United States, where I'm from in Europe, in particular the UK, but generally our continent, long may it live united. | ||
| I didn't support Brexit. | ||
| We'll do this in a year from now. | ||
| But you know, let's not forget Europe in its recent history has had a genocide against Muslims. | ||
| We've got to remember that. | ||
| It is irresponsible of us not to put that at the forefront of our minds. | ||
| It's what partly radicalized me when I was 16, 15, 16 onwards. | ||
| I say, obviously, radicalization is more than just grievances. | ||
| It's also ideology. | ||
| But grievances are a factor. | ||
| And the genocide against Muslims in Bosnia, which is recognized by most right-minded people as a genocide, is something that is ever present in the minds of these Muslims. | ||
| So keep in mind those pressures. | ||
| If there had been, you talk about African Americans in the United States, that's the only analogous thing to bring with the history of slavery here. | ||
| That we are, in a sense, the African-Americans of Europe. | ||
| It's the Muslims. | ||
| And there has been a genocide against us. | ||
| Now, in that context, to say that they are worried about backlash, because currently, factually, there isn't anything on the scale of attacks against Muslims as there have been by jihadists against everybody else. | ||
| But you can't ignore that history and you can't say they're not rightly worried about a backlash. | ||
| So those immense pressures are there. | ||
| It doesn't justify, it doesn't excuse some of the lack of outspoken and open and candid and honest conversation that I think needs to be had. | ||
| But it does mean that when we pressure them for that, we've just got to recognize some of the pressures that are on them. | ||
| Yeah, so how are you able to gauge the success or the not success of what you guys are doing, from within the Muslim community? | ||
| So like, from the world that we live in, and I think from the real liberals, I think there's an incredible amount of traction. | ||
| I tweeted out that you're coming on today, a ton of people were excited about it. | ||
| But what about gauging the success that you're having within the Muslim community? | ||
| How do you figure out if that's really making a mark? | ||
| There's lots of people, by the way, who didn't really know that I'd been on your show because it was in the early days, but when I was first on your show, and we did it over Skype as I was on the East Coast at the time, I think it was just after my conversation with Sam Harris, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, and back then, just to answer your question as to how the debate shifted within the Muslim community, Because of that conversation with Sam Harris, somebody who had been a member of Al-Muhajirun and then left them about ten years ago and was on his own evolution and journey, but was still anti-Quilliam, anti-my organization and my efforts to counter Islamist extremism and Muslim fundamentalism together. | ||
| His name is Adam Deen. | ||
| He read the book just out of curiosity. | ||
| My last conversation with him had been hostile. | ||
| He had pretty much told me that everything I was doing was rubbish. | ||
| But he read it out of curiosity, and that's credit to him because he had a curious mind, had been on a trajectory. | ||
| His former group was an offshoot of my former group. | ||
| Hizb ut-Tahrir split. | ||
| Al-Mahajirun was a faction that emerged from it, led by Omar Bakri Muhammad, founded by him, who had been the leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK. | ||
| That group went on to effectively become ISIS in Britain. | ||
| 10 years, 15 years after it split from Hizb ut-Tahrir. | ||
| It went on its own journey. | ||
| Anjum Chaudhry, the infamous Anjum Chaudhry, was its UK leader. | ||
| Omar Bakri is currently in prison in Lebanon. | ||
| Anjum Chaudhry is currently in prison in Britain for swearing allegiance to ISIS. | ||
| Omar Bakri's son died fighting for ISIS in Syria. | ||
| That's the group. | ||
| Adam, before the group became prescribed, because it also had been on a journey | ||
| from being an offshoot of Hezbollah, to become a fully-fledged jihadist group. | ||
| Before it became ISIS-affiliated, Adam left them, but still hadn't yet clarified his thoughts on this. | ||
| He read my dialogue with Sam, and that same guy now is the UK director of Quilliam. | ||
| And that's an example of some of the change and the shift that's happened in this conversation. | ||
| He brings with him a constituency, And I say that word deliberately because of course there's | ||
| still much more to do within Muslim communities. | ||
| But he carried with him a constituency from within the Muslim community that had previously been hostile to my work. | ||
| Add to that that we now have two theologians at Quilliam. | ||
| of the highest caliber. | ||
| Dr. Osama Hassan had already been involved, but he was, in those days, the only one. | ||
| It was a strange thing. | ||
| There was only one theologian that was backing us. | ||
| Now, full time at Quilliam, as well as Adam, Dr. Osama Hassan, you've got Salah Al-Ansari, who's an Egyptian graduate of the University of Al-Azhar, which is the foremost Sunni school of theology in the world. | ||
| He was the imam of the main mosque in London. | ||
| I want your viewers to register for a moment what this means. | ||
| Regent's Park Mosque in central London is the main mosque. | ||
| It's the one with a golden dome. | ||
| It's a purpose-built mosque. | ||
| The former imam of that main British mosque, the most famous mosque in the UK, is working full-time at Quilliam. | ||
| And that was, again, after my dialogue with Sam. | ||
| There has been change, and I think there's a lot more to do. | ||
| We mustn't rest on our laurels. | ||
| There's a lot more to do. | ||
| But there has been movement, and people are saying, you know, when is this reform gonna come? | ||
| It's like, come on, guys, 100 years more, or whatever, 30 years more. | ||
| This thing doesn't happen overnight. | ||
| By definition, we're engaged in a generational struggle. | ||
| Does that show you that the most important thing that perhaps you've done is just By being yourself. | ||
| That by you starting this, you've given cover, in a way, for some of these other people to start doing it. | ||
| And subsequently, they will start giving cover for other young people to start doing it. | ||
| This is the point. | ||
| I've never claimed that I'm the one who's going to do the theology. | ||
| I've come from the tradition, I've studied the theology, I memorized half the Qur'an. | ||
| We can get to this when talking about the Southern Poverty Law Center. | ||
| I've come from the tradition, I've served time in jail for my convictions in my religion. | ||
| I have studied all of the theology and learned classical Arabic to do so. | ||
| I've given my time, if you like. | ||
| But I'm not devout. | ||
| I'm not a religious Muslim. | ||
| I'm not going to put myself out there, because that would be hypocrisy. | ||
| I could have pretended I was, but I never claimed I was. | ||
| My only role was to throw open that conversation. | ||
| If it stands true that the way forward is to separate Islam from politics, then you're going to need separate voices. | ||
| You're going to need Muslims who are engaged in politics As secular Muslims, and you're going to need religious leaders engaging in the religion. | ||
| To have the same voice doing both is part of the problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So you need to separate those voices. | ||
| So my only role was to throw open that conversation and then have people like Dr. Osama Hassan, Adam Deen, Salah Ansari, who are devout Muslims, who do fast and pray five times a day, to take that forward on the theological side. | ||
| Is that the odd position that you've been put in is that, unfortunately, the left in this case, they don't, they're not giving the room for people like you to exist in a weird way. | ||
| Because I think most, correct me if I'm wrong, but I would argue that most of the criticism of you comes from the left. | ||
| You're going to get me started on the left now. | ||
| Do you want to go there? | ||
| I really don't want to do it that long because I think there's a lot more rich stuff we can talk about and people know what we think about it. | ||
| But that abandonment by the left has sort of built strange bridges in another way that maybe weren't there. | ||
| So I think there's actually some positivity at it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, the guy you're talking to has come up through the anti-racism movement, through which I joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, but which was still couched in anti-colonialism. | ||
| Of course, Islamists, you know, use that language a lot. | ||
| This is a guy who fought running street battles with neo-Nazis at the age of 15. | ||
| Knife fights. | ||
| I'm talking these guys came in with hammers and machetes, right? | ||
| A guy who joined anti-Nazi League, which is an offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party, who were protesting the neo-Nazis on the streets, who joined their rallies. | ||
| And this is a guy, you know, I was... You got a resume. | ||
| Radicalized by the Bosnia genocide, right? | ||
| This is a guy, I would have thought, I would have had a problem and faced resistance from the right because that's all I've ever faced resistance from. | ||
| I've grown up in the days before the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the United Kingdom, which was a watershed moment for race relations in the UK. | ||
| It led to the McPherson inquiry, an official government inquiry, which led to the McPherson report. | ||
| Which concluded officially from the UK government's official position was after that inquiry that there was institutional racism in the UK police forces and much has changed since then. | ||
| That's what I came up through, right? | ||
| My stabbing attacks that I had to face were a year before Stephen Lawrence was a black British teenager was murdered on the streets of the UK. | ||
| And no one was brought to justice for about 15, 20 years because these guys were connected with their friends and family and the police. | ||
| And it was a massive miscarriage of justice. | ||
| I have only ever witnessed hostility from the right, from who I am, that I can't even change. | ||
| It's the colour of my skin, right? | ||
| My cultural and religious heritage. | ||
| I'd never expected to be attacked from the left. | ||
| And when it came, it felt, and what it didn't just feel, it was treachery of the highest order. | ||
| Because these guys, these are the same guys who say, talk about appropriation. | ||
| They say, we want people of color to speak and don't explain to them, listen to their voices, their authentic experiences, right? | ||
| You know, along comes somebody. | ||
| Who is the textbook definition of the kinds of authentic experiences that they want you to listen to? | ||
| But because my conclusions don't match what they want me to say, because I'm not parroting their answers, suddenly They have a bit of a brain fry, and they can't reconcile that. | ||
| So they say, OK, people of colour have been subjected to racism. | ||
| Check. | ||
| War on Terror victimises Muslims. | ||
| Check. | ||
| Guess what, guys? | ||
| I served in prison in the War on Terror. | ||
| People get tortured. | ||
| Check. | ||
| Witness torture in jail. | ||
| They say... | ||
| We're profiling Muslims at airports. | ||
| Check! | ||
| That's happened to me. | ||
| I've had my DNA taken from me and the UK suspended the Miranda rights in ports of entry and exit from the UK. | ||
| So if you're silent in an airport like Heathrow, it's a criminal offence. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| That was done to me. | ||
| I was interrogated and cautioned that my silence is a criminal offense. | ||
| My DNA was taken from me. | ||
| Check. | ||
| I've been banned from entry into the United States. | ||
| I had to fight to get that ban lifted. | ||
| Check, right? | ||
| All of the grievances the left talk about, and they say, you've got to listen to these victimized voices. | ||
| OK, fine. | ||
| Listen to my voice then. | ||
| What I'm saying to you, there's a serious and real problem within our communities. | ||
| Theocrats have hijacked the debate that cultural relativism is betraying the minorities within our communities, who are the gay Muslims, the ex-Muslims, the feminist Muslims, the liberal Muslims, the dissenting voices, the minority sects. | ||
| And I say, listen to this, it's a real problem. | ||
| And because they only want me to talk about colonialism and foreign policy, suddenly I turn into the enemy. | ||
| That's treachery of the highest order. | ||
| Yeah, I wonder, I try not to impugn people's intentions. | ||
| I really try not to. | ||
| I try to believe that the people that maybe are intellectual opponents, I believe they think they're doing good, for the most part. | ||
| There are some people that I think are not doing good, and I'd like to mention a couple of them to you. | ||
| But I was at an event that I did at a school, University of Austin, I think, a couple weeks ago, and a kid came up to me at the end, and I could see he was really nervous, young kid, he was 18 or 19. | ||
| And he said to me, you know, I'm ex-Muslim, and I can see he was about to cry, and he said, you know, you've helped me just talking about these things. | ||
| And then he said to me, he said, there's something else that I want to tell you. | ||
| I'm like you. | ||
| And he couldn't quite say that he was gay, but I knew what he was trying to say to me, and I didn't know what to do, and I kind of hugged him, and there were tears in his eyes. | ||
| And I thought, what craziness! | ||
| we're dealing with. | ||
| The things that people say about you, or say about me, or say about Sam, or Ayaan, or these people that are fighting so that everyone will be treated equally, they've pinned people like this poor kid into feeling like he's almost like a betrayer by coming to an event where we might be. | ||
| So this is it, when that voice comes along, or when my voice comes along, and we check all the grievance boxes that the left always talks about with people of color, but we don't parrot their conclusions, And then they attack us for it? | ||
| It tells me that they were weaponizing and using our grievances for their own ideological dogma. | ||
| Because the moment our conclusions didn't match with their dogma, they then ended up attacking us too. | ||
| So they're clearly not interested in our grievances. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Otherwise, they would say, OK, you know what? | ||
| As they always say, don't speak for that person of color. | ||
| Let that person of color speak for themselves. | ||
| And don't judge their cultural experience. | ||
| That's a valid experience that you have to learn from. | ||
| That's what they say about the African-American history here, right? | ||
| It's always about not appropriating voices that are not theirs. | ||
| And yet, all of a sudden, I'm labeled a native informant or an Uncle Tom because my voice doesn't match with the conclusions they want to come to. | ||
| And this guy that you met, It's happened to me so many times. | ||
| I was the first British Muslim on national television for BBC Question Time as a political panel. | ||
| It's a well-known panel debate. | ||
| And during the time just before gay marriage equality was legalised in the UK, there was a debate on this panel and I was on it. | ||
| And we had a DUP leader, Ian Paisley Jr. | ||
| DUP is currently famous because the Conservative government in the UK is considering an alliance with the DUP to stay in power. | ||
| This is an anti-gay, anti-all sorts of thing, you know, very ultra-conservative socially party. | ||
| And Ian Paisley Jr. | ||
| was on my panel then and I openly, you can see the clip on YouTube, I said you're a bigot and your views are bigoted and it was on gay marriage. | ||
| The number of gay Muslims writing to me saying we've never heard a Muslim man defending us in this way on television. | ||
| And the emotional responses I got, it tells me the sheer level of vulnerability and isolation that they feel. | ||
| When surveyed, I think 52% of British Muslims said they would ban homosexuality. | ||
| It's according to Trevor Phillips' ICM poll. | ||
| Before that, a Guardian poll found that 0% said that being gay was morally justified. | ||
| Imagine how it feels to be a gay Muslim. | ||
| And yet the left doesn't, I should say, the regressive left doesn't want to acknowledge that there's a problem within the community. | ||
| I'm glad you almost made that mistake there because I think it illustrates a point. | ||
| We're doing this live for an hour. | ||
| You just got off a plane. | ||
| I think you missed your first flight to get here. | ||
| You're doing real time tonight. | ||
| You're doing another thing at 2 a.m. | ||
| our time here. | ||
| You have other things going on here. | ||
| There's a chance you could slip and just accidentally say the left. | ||
| And then you know, or we know, unfortunately, there's a certain subset of people that are gonna go, | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| ah, you see, Majid's talking about all of that. | ||
| That danger, when you were on Sam's podcast last time, I think you talked a little bit about a force field | ||
| that you sort of need to build your shield up. | ||
| That's right, that's right, yeah. | ||
| These are my Star Wars and Star Trek analogies. | ||
| I've got plenty of Star Wars stuff around here. | ||
| Is that Luke Scott? | ||
| Who is that? | ||
| That's me at Target. | ||
| You can take a picture in front of it and they'll 3D print it for you. | ||
| I was wondering. | ||
| It doesn't look like Luke. | ||
| That's me as Luke, I guess. | ||
| But that concept of if you just screw up a word, you know you're gonna be under assault, this is kind of a new thing, right? | ||
| And how much attention should we pay to that? | ||
| Well, I think the internet has led to this, right? | ||
| Because there's instant responses. | ||
| We've got to allow for human error. | ||
| What I think is what's more important is the substance of what somebody's saying and knowing what they're trying to say based on their historical record. | ||
| And so even if now I'd said the left and hadn't said the regressive left and had carried on, and hadn't corrected my sentence. | ||
| If you know my work, you know what I'm referring to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so, it's important to put somebody's words in the context of what they're saying. | ||
| The other mistake people often make, I've been known to be engaged in dialogue, not only with Sam Harris, but with other ex-Muslims, prominent ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and people throw at me from within the Muslim community, but Ayaan said we're at war with Islam and Islam must be destroyed. | ||
| And the other mistake people make is they don't allow for people's views to have evolved since from when they're quoting them. | ||
| You could bring stuff up from me in the year 2006. | ||
| It's online, right? | ||
| When I got fresh out of prison, I did a BBC Hard Talk interview with Sarah Montagu, and I was at a rally in London, this so-called Al-Quds Day rally. | ||
| The very guy that called me a hate preacher today, I spoke at his rally in 2006, by the way. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Yeah, as a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, right? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's before I left the group. | ||
| You could bring this stuff up, but everyone knows, not only have I changed since then, I'm actually very vocal against that group. | ||
| So the other thing we've gotta allow for isn't just human error, but also human evolution. | ||
| People move and mature and change. | ||
| So don't quote me stuff from Ayaan 10 years ago, when she's just written a book, just now, called Heretic, in which she says, I'm gonna start differentiating between Islam and Islamism and support Muslim reformers. | ||
| Doesn't it also, it shows sort of, It's like a lack of tolerance in a really strange way, too, because it's not just that you're not allowing someone to evolve, you're also pinning them on words that don't take the breath of their work. | ||
| I mean, you know, I've now gotten to know Ayan a little bit. | ||
| This is the most lovely person on the face of the planet, and the idea that they're going to, well, we got you on that one sentence. | ||
| And also, you've got to be able to disagree with somebody and recognize they're a lovely human being. | ||
| Which is another, I'd say, let's make that the third element. | ||
| That even if after you allow for human error and you allow for human evolution, you've also got to allow for humanity. | ||
| You know, just as a human being. | ||
| You know, we mentioned earlier, off air, and we can come to him if you want, but Douglas Murray. | ||
| You know, the guy is a very civil, very genteel, when you meet him one-on-one, very polite, you know, to a fault, almost. | ||
| in the way he is. | ||
| Just think of the typical Etonian English mannerisms. | ||
| This man has them. | ||
| For us in America, that's a lot of Downton Abbey. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| He belongs on the set of Downton Abbey. | ||
| As an aside, I first cast eyes on my wife, my now wife, in that Intelligence Squared debate I did against Ayanna Douglas. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And Douglas and I were waiting in the Maritime Hotel and back then we weren't friends and we weren't on civil terms. | ||
| We were being civil, but we weren't friends. | ||
| And so we're sitting at opposite ends of the lobby. | ||
| I don't know what he was thinking, but I didn't want to engage with the opponent before this debate. | ||
| And we're both waiting to be received by the IQ Squared representative. | ||
| So they sent this car, pretty much like you did, to bring me here. | ||
| They sent this car and they sent somebody to come and to receive us at the Maritime Hotel in New York. | ||
| And in walks this tall, beautiful, model-esque looking woman, Rachel. | ||
| Turns out to now be my wife. | ||
| I married her. | ||
| And we both saw her at the same time. | ||
| I'm secretly thinking, thank God Douglas is gay. | ||
| Because he's a really smooth operator. | ||
| And because he's gay, there was no competition. | ||
| And I imagine that if he wasn't gay, I probably wouldn't have been married to him, right? | ||
| By him being, if he had been straight, this whole thing could have just veered off into a horrible place. | ||
| Right, so the point I'm making is, you've got to allow for human error, human evolution and humanity. | ||
| Douglas Murray and I are on different ends of the political spectrum. | ||
| He and I will disagree on which way to vote. | ||
| I didn't vote Conservative in this general election we just had, another one. | ||
| You'll have another one by the time you leave the studio. | ||
| I voted, but I didn't vote Conservative. | ||
| I voted Liberal Democrat. | ||
| I'm a Liberal. | ||
| I stood for Parliament as a Liberal Democrat. | ||
| Douglas Murray is highly critical of my party and the views and values it stands for. | ||
| We're on different ends of the political spectrum. | ||
| He is somebody who I imagine votes Conservative. | ||
| He often espouses the views of the Conservative Party on a number of issues. | ||
| But you've got to allow, as I say, for the humanities, if we want the kind of civilization, and this is a concluding point on this note, if we want to allow for the kind of civilization, what are we fighting against with the Islamists and the theocrats? | ||
| We're fighting against their desire to shut down everything they don't agree with. | ||
| And so in return, when we're fighting for our civilizational values, our problem with them is they want to shut down everything they don't agree with. | ||
| So how does it make sense that we mimic that? | ||
| I'm happy that there are right-wing and left-wing views out there. | ||
| Remain is everything I'm fighting for. | ||
| I want somebody to say, imagine, I'm sorry but your views on taxation and the National Health Service are mad. | ||
| I'll be like, yeah, good on you, carry on. | ||
| Because that's exactly what I'm fighting for. | ||
| And that's why for me, and it's different for everybody, I have found it easier to have sit-downs with conservatives or libertarians who are to the right of me on certain things, but they're willing to say, well, we gotta live in the same society together, where a lot of the people on the left seem, if you think differently about abortion or certainly about Islam or a few of these other things, they impugn you as a human being. | ||
| And I think that's where the disconnect is, which is why someone like you and Ayaan, and Brigitte Gabriel, who's been here, are anti-Muslim extremists, according to the Southern Diabolical Law Center. | ||
| So when you woke up and saw that thing, I saw what you did on Twitter, but I mean, for all you do, and for the human, not Maajid the public person, but for the human, what's that like? | ||
| Well, it was a massive head in the hands moment, just thinking, my God, you know, They're based in Alabama, by the way. | ||
| So you've got these white non-Muslim guys. | ||
| And it is relevant. | ||
| People say, why are you bringing identity? | ||
| Because obviously I'm against identity politics. | ||
| But it is relevant because the point is, these are people who play the identity politics game. | ||
| So by their own criteria, they're being hypocrites. | ||
| You've got these white men sitting in sweet Alabama. | ||
| Deciding from up on high in their ivory tower to devise lists and label people in this way with no taste for or real experience in the real danger that that brings. | ||
| You know, we talk about lists. | ||
| We look at what happened in Bangladesh and the jihadists listed. | ||
| People that they called atheist Muslims. | ||
| In reality, they were liberal Muslims, ex-Muslims, secular Muslims, a whole bunch of humanist Muslims. | ||
| For a jihadist, you're all atheists. | ||
| You're all infidel, right? | ||
| So they listed this. | ||
| And then, one by one, those people started getting assassinated. | ||
| That's just the truth of it. | ||
| It happened in Bangladesh. | ||
| It happened with Ayaan in the Netherlands. | ||
| It's not just an Eastern phenomenon. | ||
| It's happening in Europe. | ||
| Geert Wilders was murdered. | ||
| and the list they stuck on his body with a knife. | ||
| No, no, not Gert. | ||
| Sorry, sorry. | ||
| Theo van Gogh. | ||
| Oh my God, yeah, good correction. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now that's the importance of... That's the quote that they'll take and go with. | |
| Allow for human error. | ||
| No, so Tia van Gogh, I do apologize. | ||
| Tia van Gogh was murdered. | ||
|
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It's all Dutch names. | |
| Just edit that video! | ||
| You see, Maajid calls for the Bruttenbergs to be killed. | ||
| So Tia van Gogh was murdered. | ||
| It's all Dutch names. | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| No, Tia van Gogh was murdered and they stabbed a list in his body and Ayaan was listed next. | ||
| You know, that's what happens when you make lists. | ||
|
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Because it... | |
| Whether it's right-wing lists or left-wing lists, when we think of the political horseshoe theory, if you go far left enough, you end up behaving exactly as the far right. | ||
| And it's why we study Stalin and Hitler together in history lessons in the United Kingdom. | ||
| Because whether you go to a far left guy or a far right guy, this guy had the concentration camps, this guy had the gulags. | ||
| But it's effectively this guy murdered all his opponents, this guy murdered all his opponents. | ||
| This guy said anyone who challenges him is the enemy of the people. | ||
| This guy said anyone who challenges him is the enemy of the people. | ||
| And that's the political horseshoe. | ||
| If you go far enough you end up at the... You know what a horseshoe does, if you think about it, it's a beautiful thing because you start from here and you go up and it forks and it ends up at the top. | ||
| Now Stalin and Hitler are both, let's say they're both there, but it's interesting they're from above because to me that represents authoritarianism and totalitarianism and that's the issue here. | ||
| And so we can't be consistently, as people who are coming from the liberal trajectory, we cannot morally complain about McCarthyism. | ||
| if we're doing the same thing on the liberal end of the political spectrum. | ||
| And I distinguish between the left and liberal these days. | ||
| We can get to that. | ||
| Yeah, so let's just jump into that quickly, because I did a video about three months ago saying that the left is no longer liberal. | ||
| So I have shifted in my language a little bit, the way I use language, because when I refer to the modern left now, They are not liberal in the classical liberal tradition. | ||
| They're not, they're not. | ||
| Now, it's funny, when I titled that video, I quickly did a Google search, because I wanted to make sure we weren't gonna step on anything or people were gonna confuse it or anything, and I came up with one of your clips. | ||
| I'd already done the same video. | ||
| And you had done, I think it may have literally been the same words. | ||
| Yeah, and it was called The Left is No Longer Liberal, yeah, on my LBC show. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So I watched the clip, and you said everything that I believe about this. | ||
| Why do you... | ||
| So again, so in a weird way, it goes against the differentiation that we're having to make now between regressive left and left, because we're both acknowledging that. | ||
| There is a difference. | ||
| The left is no longer liberal in today's sense of what the left is, I think is accurate, but that doesn't mean it's all regressive left, right? | ||
| So how I look at it is you've got the control left. | ||
| People ask me, because I had this other phrase, control left, control left, alt right, delete, right? | ||
| You should be making some money on this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, this is the importance of language. | ||
| So people are like, what is a control left? | ||
| And I say, OK, and they're saying, are you now replacing the word regressive left because Dave Rubin kind of overused it to the contrary? | ||
| No, no, no, guys. | ||
| The regressive left is still a concept that has its value and purpose and describes a specific subset of the left. | ||
| The control left, to my mind, is the authoritarian left. | ||
| The regressive left isn't the same as that. | ||
| And here's an example of it. | ||
| I go to these solid examples just to make the point. | ||
| I don't want to bring everything back to Hitler and Stalin. | ||
| But here you look at Stalin, it really does drive the point home. | ||
| Stalin wasn't a cultural relativist. | ||
| So in that sense he wasn't regressive left. | ||
| But there is clearly an authoritarianism in Stalin. | ||
| And that's how you see the difference. | ||
| What I mean by the control left is the totalitarian authoritarian approach. | ||
| Stalin wiped out religion in Russia. | ||
| Hated religion. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You know what he did to the Muslims in Chechnya is well documented. | ||
| So you could be somebody who's control left and not regressive left. | ||
| And you could be somebody who's regressive left and not control left. | ||
| And so it's correct though to say that the modern left with its leading voices today isn't liberal in that it focuses on communalism over individual autonomy. | ||
| It focuses on offense over free speech. | ||
| It focuses on blasphemy over heresy. | ||
| I'd say a modern liberal today needs to be a heretic, needs to value free speech, needs to value individual rights and individual autonomy over communalism. | ||
| And those are key distinguishers for me today between what are the leading voices on the left and the leading voices who are liberals. | ||
| Still different from the right wing. | ||
| Yeah, so are those traditions that you're talking about, classical liberal traditions, having nothing to do with Islam right now? | ||
| Do you think that those ideas are taking root in Britain right now? | ||
| Well, no, I mean, we're on the back foot. | ||
| What's taking root is the polarization of politics. | ||
| The liberal voice, in the way that I've just described it, is being hammered by all sides and is finding itself increasingly isolated. | ||
| Do you think it's shifting to the right? | ||
| Because what I sense, at least here, and it's not exactly the same, Is that because at least in America right now, there is a little more of a tradition of individualism on the right, that I think that the people that are of the left that believe in individualism and classical liberalism, they're realizing there's virtually nothing left. | ||
| There's just scorched earth over here. | ||
| They see the way they're treated when they have the alternate opinion or something like that. | ||
| And I do sense there's a shifting to the right. | ||
| I don't think that's necessarily bad, but I would rather keep everybody and have a strong classical liberal position. | ||
| I would advise them, pin your flag to the mast and be the last man standing, no matter what it takes, and not shift to the right. | ||
| I don't think it's... I can see it happening here. | ||
| In Britain, it's not happening. | ||
| What's happening is they're shifting to the left. | ||
| They're giving up and they're saying, OK, this last election, OK, between Corbyn and Theresa May. | ||
| Now, Corbyn is the left-wing populist leader of the Labour Party currently. | ||
| He and his momentum movement hijacked the Labour Party from within. | ||
| And he's now kind of the, you think of alt-right, the populist left version of it is Jeremy Corbyn, right? | ||
| And people are now saying okay between Theresa May and her potential alliance with the DUP and the disastrous way in which she handled this fire tragedy which has had was horrible the Grenfell fire tragedy up to 80 people lost their lives and and it was all vulnerable people and could have been and would have been and should have been avoided if the Conservative government implemented some recommendations that they were already given and that the housing minister of that government pledged Parliament to implement and didn't. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| And people are saying, OK, between these guys who don't care for vulnerable communities and this guy who says he does care, there's no point voting Liberal Democrat. | ||
| We're going to vote Corbyn. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| So we really are having an opposite split here. | ||
| But it's still it's the same thing, though. | ||
| It's populism and it's authoritarian tendencies going this way or that way. | ||
| And so you look at the political horseshoe. | ||
| Actually, it's not that different when you're at the top there. | ||
| What we need to try and do is keep people In their respective political positions, because we don't want, I often say, unity in religion is theocracy, unity in politics is fascism, right? | ||
| We don't want unity in politics. | ||
| We don't want to all say the same thing. | ||
| People say, come on, let's agree to get along and ignore our differences. | ||
| No, those differences are a good thing, right? | ||
| Because unity in politics is fascism. | ||
| It's what Mussolini brought. | ||
| So we've got to somehow devise a way Of pinning our flag to the master as liberals while also defending the left and right wing positions and allowing them to be left and right wing. | ||
| Our enemy is, when you're at the top of that horseshoe, is the authoritarianism and the populism. | ||
| That's the danger. | ||
| And unfortunately, currently, we're on a bit of a back foot with that battle. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'll stay in that spot with you as long as it takes, and hopefully, that's why I talk about philosophies here more than just what happened yesterday or what did Trump tweet? | ||
| Because I want people to understand the basic philosophies so that they can come to some conclusions instead of everyone's just lost in the 24-hour news cycle, and that just leads to more hysteria. | ||
| The polls are saying today, by the way, if there was an election again in Britain, because Theresa May lost her majority and did abysmally poorly and is turning out to be a very poor prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn would win. | ||
| Do you think her worst moment, Theresa May's worst moment was just a couple of days before the election | ||
| when she said something to the effect of, we'll change human rights laws if that will keep us safe. | ||
| Did you catch that? | ||
| I'm slightly butchering the quote. | ||
| And I responded to it. | ||
| She gave four points to respond to the horrific London Bridge terror attacks. | ||
| You know, of course, I'm speaking to you after four months of as many, so four attacks in as many months in the UK. | ||
| We had four terrorist attacks in four months and the Grenfell fire tragedy, which was, which also shocked the nation. | ||
| It's difficult for me to explain how shook the nation was after that fire tragedy. | ||
| It was a burning inferno and it was just everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. | ||
| And people were like, is this still happening in 2017? | ||
| So, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, after the London Bridge terror attack, came out with a four-point strategy, and one of them touched on human rights. | ||
| She's always been a bit state-heavy, always preferred arrest what I call law and war. | ||
| over the civil society debate. | ||
| She's been like that since she's been in the Home Office as Home Secretary, and in fact, she and I and her department, sounds bigger than it is, but she had the department, I'm just one voice, but we were at loggerheads over this. | ||
| And eventually, David Cameron, when he was Prime Minister, picked my approach over hers, and she's never forgiven me for that. | ||
| Her department and her key people, her key voices have never forgiven Quilliam and my voice for Cameron siding with us over that debate. | ||
| But then, of course, she became Prime Minister. | ||
| And was able to do whatever she wanted to do. | ||
| And her two advisors, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, who were her chiefs of staff. | ||
| went with her from the Home Office to Downing Street. | ||
| And again, they remember that spat and the conflict and David Cameron siding with us on this. | ||
| So they also carried that with them to Downing Street. | ||
| They've obviously since resigned. | ||
| They've had to since the general election performance. | ||
| But Theresa May has always had a preference for just where she can't understand the intellectual debate, ban it. | ||
| You know, do this, do that, legislation. | ||
| Regulate the internet is her new one. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| As if you're going to be able to do that from the United Kingdom. | ||
| I think that's hard for a certain amount of people to understand that someone with this much power, and again, it's why I talk about the philosophies, when she said, do you remember what the exact line was? | ||
| We'll change those human rights laws or something? | ||
| Something similar, yeah. | ||
| And she said we will regulate, make the UK the world's leader in regulating the internet. | ||
| That is a recipe for making the UK the farthest behind in being on the internet. | ||
| We'll go past Saudi Arabia. | ||
| Most people would hear that and think it's a problem. | ||
| But she said it. | ||
| There didn't seem to be any caution in her voice. | ||
| There didn't seem to be any hesitancy. | ||
| Now, I get it. | ||
| A terrorist attack happens, you want to appear strong, you want to appear like you're gonna stop the next one, or whatever it is. | ||
| But it seems to me that if you're a thinking person, and maybe this is exactly what your point is, people heard that, and they go, that is dangerous. | ||
| That's dangerous state power. | ||
| So now, even though we don't like Corbyn, we're going that way, and maybe that's why you're saying that shit. | ||
| Well, after those London Bridge attacks, There were certain voices that came forward who are traditionally of a conservative, so military and police forces. | ||
| Traditionally they're associated with voting, the military for example. | ||
| So there's a Colonel Kemp who came out and said we need Britain to open up its own Guantanamo Bay and introduce internment. | ||
| This is a respected military figure saying it to the press after the London Bridge attacks. | ||
| And so the problem of course is that Like I said earlier, if the very thing we hate with the jihadists and Islamist ideologues, from which they emanate, is that they want to | ||
| Undermine our human rights. | ||
| If we recognize that what they're fighting us for is because of our free, democratic, secular, open, pluralistic societies. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If that's what they hate and why they're fighting us, and if the right wing is saying, it's not about grievances, Dave. | ||
| It's not about, you know, racism, foreign policy. | ||
| It's about ideology, Dave. | ||
| It's not about grievances. | ||
| That's what the right wing say. | ||
| OK, fine. | ||
| Let's take your argument. | ||
| If it is about ideology, if it's true, working with your working assumption that jihadists hate us because of our freedom, freedom and democracy, Then why would you destroy those very same values yourself with your own hands? | ||
| Yeah, which I think is partly, I mean, I think that's a bigger part of the plan than we even give credit to. | ||
| ISIS has told us that! | ||
| Right, they're basically saying, well just, this is the long war and we're just gonna let you guys do this yourselves. | ||
| Destroy yourselves! | ||
| They're spelling it out for us that we're going to attack you in these marauding street attacks in this randomized way. | ||
| We're just going to carry on mowing your pedestrians down on your streets until you people rise up and start attacking Muslims too because then there's a civil war and those Muslims are going to come and fight under our jihadist brigades to defend themselves. | ||
| That's exactly what they want. | ||
| So anyone, anyone calling for a civil war style reaction to these terrorist attacks doesn't truly understand their military strategy. | ||
| And you can't defeat a military strategy unless you understand what it is and do everything to subvert it, not to reinforce it. | ||
| So I want to shift a little bit to something that I think is an actual really positive development. | ||
| Because we're talking about some sort of political developments that don't sound great. | ||
| There's a lot of bad stuff here. | ||
| But one of the things that I've been seeing lately is that there are now public splits within the Muslim community. | ||
| So there's the ex-Muslims versus the, I will no longer say nominal Muslim, the mainstream Muslim. | ||
| versus people that are slightly more religious. | ||
| And there's a lot of infighting, public infighting, I mean, on Twitter and whatever else. | ||
| I view that as a positive thing. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Because this is showing, wow, people are standing up for what they believe in. | ||
| You've got atheist Muslims, like our friend Ali. | ||
| You've got, you know, Yasmin Mohammed, who is here, who I think is an amazing ex-Muslim. | ||
| You have people that are trying to reform from the inside, like yourself, and what you guys are doing with Quilliam. | ||
| This shows now, I mean, the curing of the debate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think certain people look at it and they go, ah, they're all fighting, this is gonna just destroy it. | ||
| I think it's the reverse. | ||
| Spot on, and back to what I said earlier. | ||
| Unity in politics is fascism. | ||
| Unity in religion is theocracy. | ||
| If we achieve what we want to achieve, assuming you're with me on this, Dave. | ||
| So far I'm with you. | ||
| I don't know, what are you gonna do, drop a bomb right now? | ||
| That was a terrible. | ||
| Say that again, did they catch it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, Lord. | |
| This is why we don't do things live. | ||
| Dave has just accused me of dropping a bomb, guys. | ||
| You're profiling me. | ||
| No, if we achieve what we want to achieve, and that is letting a thousand flowers bloom, the political pluralism that we say is the essence of our civilization, then you will have this debate and it long may remain. | ||
| It has to be there. | ||
| I want to see The right-wing Muslims and the left-wing Muslims and the ex-Muslims and the liberal reforming Muslims. | ||
| I want to see them all debating and disagreeing in a civil way, of course. | ||
| Because let's not forget where this began. | ||
| And your viewers, maybe even yourself, may not remember. | ||
| It's been nine years since we set Quilliam up. | ||
| Nine years ago in London, I gave a talk, a public talk, before setting Quilliam up. | ||
| So the talk was probably ten years ago, just after I left Hizb ut-Tahrir. | ||
| And the room was packed full of Muslims. | ||
| Because back then, a lot of the Islamists still had time for me. | ||
| I hadn't yet set Quilliam up. | ||
| And I just left his battalion. | ||
| I was like, what's this guy going to say next? | ||
| And I, in that talk, in couching it in religious language, said, effectively, we must have a way to arrive at secularism. | ||
| It was the most controversial thing. | ||
| The video is still online. | ||
| It was called The City Circle. | ||
| It's a 10-year-old YouTube video. | ||
| It's in like seven parts. | ||
| It's before people started doing flashy edits of videos. | ||
|
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Right, right. | |
| You know, it's like a 20-minute segment in seven parts, and this is awful to get through. | ||
| Nobody's going to watch. | ||
| No one's going to. | ||
| You know, people were outraged. | ||
| Majid Nawaz is suggesting that we need to begin somehow developing a secular conversation within Islam. | ||
| The debate has moved on so much and the reason I bring this up is because ten years ago in discourse within British Muslim communities, there wasn't that pluralism of voices. | ||
| There was one voice and it was the Islamist voice. | ||
| And that's theocracy. | ||
| To have unity in politics is fascism. | ||
| To have unity in religion is theocracy. | ||
| And so the fact that all this plethora of voices now exists is fantastic. | ||
| And that's why I don't have a problem. | ||
| I'm so happy that Zuhdi Jasser is on the Republican side of American politics as a reforming Muslim. | ||
| I'm so happy that there are even reforming Muslims who say, no, we back Trump, like Asrar Normani. | ||
| And I'm so happy that there are others like myself and Ali Rizvi who are saying, no, we're liberals and we're not gonna vote Republican. | ||
| We're not gonna back Trump even. | ||
| Doesn't that really show that you stand for your principles because it's the reverse of what they've been doing to you. | ||
| You are fully admitting these people who I disagree with deeply politically on either side of this, I'm happy that they're out there doing this. | ||
| It preserves our civilization. | ||
| Everything we love and hold dear to is political pluralism, secularism, democracy. | ||
| And so, you know, we have to have those voices. | ||
| And the fact that, think about the fact that there are Muslims saying we back Trump, and there are Muslims saying we back Republicans, and Muslims saying we back Obama or Hillary. | ||
| What that does is see the Islamist, and remember, that's what we're all in this for, is to try and push back against the biggest threat to world global security today is jihadist terrorism. | ||
| The Islamist ideologue will say, no, you're only allowed one voice in politics, and that's the theocratic voice. | ||
| So the mere existence of these pluralistic voices is a blow, a severe blow, to the Islamist ideological project. | ||
| It's why I'm so happy. | ||
| Any blow to the Islamist ideological project is progress. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny, you know, I see there's a real sense of joy within you, which I know we all, anyone that stakes themselves out in any place, and you mentioned, and the force fields that you were talking about before, like there's a certain cost I sense at the moment that you're on sort of a nice run at the moment, is it? | ||
| Just on a total personal... Only because of how I'm coming across to you, yeah? | ||
| No, I couldn't do this if I didn't really believe in it and passionately care for it and as a result enjoy progress when I see it. | ||
| But talking about good runs and costs, I mean, look, I am on my emotional, personal toll that it's taken on me. | ||
| It's still there, very heavy, and You know, I don't know why, and this is probably for psychologists to work out, but no, it's a seriously heavy emotional toll. | ||
| I have a 16-year-old boy who I haven't seen for a long time, and I wish I could see him again. | ||
| I wish I could hold him. | ||
| Because I've just had a five-month-old baby boy, so I have two boys, and I want him to know his brother. | ||
| But you know when I left Hizb ut-Tahrir my wife left me and she raised that boy and it's a terribly difficult thing to be estranged from your own flesh and blood after having been in prison for five years. | ||
| And my brother as well disagrees with everything I stand for and he has children and you know it's a difficult thing. | ||
| And the only thing that gets you through this is you've got to believe in what you're doing. | ||
| You've got to believe in the fact that it's doing some good. | ||
| People will judge that as to whether it is doing good or not. | ||
| But no, what gets me through is that I believe in what I'm doing. | ||
| If I didn't believe and wasn't as passionate then that other stuff would have really weighed on me by now and I don't know where I'd be. | ||
| No, I mean, I can see it. | ||
| If I've learned one thing as an interviewer, it's there are moments when I can find that somebody doesn't really believe what they're saying, and I literally see no wavering in you, and it's inspiring, actually. | ||
| You see, the only thing we should be certain about, by the way, is that nothing is certain. | ||
| That's important, by the way, because people come in, they're like, I'm convinced 100% of my position is that you shouldn't be. | ||
| The only thing you should be convinced of is everyone has a position, and we've got to preserve that. | ||
| I think my position is right. | ||
| Talk about liberalism. | ||
| I think it's the best political philosophy to arrive at, but I could be wrong. | ||
| Yeah, well, you're gonna see Bill Maher tonight, and as he says all the time, it's okay every now and again to say, I don't know. | ||
| And yet, somehow in the public discourse, this has been lost. | ||
| So let's shift a little bit to two people that, There's a little neither here nor there with both of them on this issue, I think. | ||
| So, Piers Morgan first, real quick. | ||
| You saw the video, I'm sure, from BBC. | ||
| Was it BBC Morning Show? | ||
| With Tommy. | ||
| Yeah, with Tommy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| With Tommy Robinson, yeah. | ||
| But I want to mention Piers first because... | ||
| Piers seems to be taking sort of every position on this, where there are times where I offer him a public, he was on real time and trying to talk about this honestly, and a little bit of the ideas and people thing, and making the distinction, and you know, I forget who it was that basically told him to go fuck himself, and I, was it Larry Wilmore? | ||
| I'm blanking. | ||
| I saw that, but I can't remember who it was. | ||
| Yeah, it wasn't Larry Wilmore, it was somebody else. | ||
| I offered him a full-throated defense. | ||
| You know, like, he's trying here. | ||
| And even though I disagree with this guy on a zillion things, he's trying. | ||
| Then this thing happens on BBC Morning Show. | ||
| It's confusion. | ||
| I was on Pierce's show before that, and he wouldn't even let me speak because of how much he was agreeing with me. | ||
| On, you know, there's a problem, we need to do something about it. | ||
| So with Tommy, he wasn't letting him speak because of how much he disagreed with him. | ||
| With me, he wasn't letting me speak because of how much he agreed with what I was saying, right? | ||
| So this is more about the psychological condition. | ||
| Yeah, there's a confusion, understandably so. | ||
| There's a confusion among people who are just entering this debate. | ||
| Now, you know, somebody who's spent my entire life in this debate, I've got to give a bit of leeway. | ||
| So you're referring to the now infamous interview between Piers Morgan and Tommy Robinson on Piers' morning show in the United Kingdom. | ||
| Yeah, just a couple days ago. | ||
| Yeah, and it's online, people can catch it. | ||
| If you haven't already watched it, then what are you doing watching the Dave Rubin Show? | ||
| Right, you need to know this! | ||
| To me, it was almost a low-grade Sam vs. Affleck question race. | ||
| Yeah, it was one of those moments. | ||
| And look, Tommy has his weaknesses. | ||
| We'll get to him in a second, but that's why I want to do Pierce first. | ||
| Let's do Pierce first. | ||
| I tweeted after this, and I said, with respect, with the utmost respect and appreciation that mainstream journalists are worried about anti-Muslim bigotry. | ||
| Rightly so. | ||
| We just had the Finsbury Park mosque terror attack. | ||
| Muslims were mowed down on the streets in exactly the same way that ISIS jihadists are doing to non-Muslims. | ||
| Despicable. | ||
| Nothing can ever justify it. | ||
| And if we talk about If we talk about how Islamists will use foreign policy grievances to justify jihadist terrorism, the same thing happened here. | ||
| People started saying, well, come on, what did you expect? | ||
| Muslims have been killing us. | ||
| No, you've just mowed down innocent people that had nothing to do with it. | ||
| Even if that was an Islamist mosque, which it was, right? | ||
| They aren't the ones who murdered all those people on the streets. | ||
| You can't just murder innocent people. | ||
| Even if that very night they had been preaching horrible things, you can't do that. | ||
| You can't, that's not, you know, and in fact, we have to look at the times we're in. | ||
| I think you can't murder innocent people is a sentence I just heard me utter on your show, you know? | ||
| You just keep getting more controversial. | ||
| It just never ends with you. | ||
| Dave, you can't murder innocent people. | ||
| You understand, right? | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| Okay, you still agree with me? | ||
| I'm so far. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let me see where you're taking this. | ||
| So Pierce, right? | ||
| So Pierce was rightly outraged because people were justifying the attack on social media. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The problem with Pierce is that, in that interview, I say problem with Pierce, in the interview, the problem with Pierce was that he was rightly outraged and I thanked him. | ||
| In my tweet I said, I thank mainstream journalists for genuinely caring about anti-Muslim bigotry. | ||
| As I said, we can't ignore the fact that we've had a genocide against Muslims in Europe. | ||
| So people are right when they say, but Majid, jihadist terrorism and anti-Muslim bigotry are nowhere near each other on the scale. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Jihadist terrorism is up there. | ||
| Anti-Muslim bigotry is the fastest rising. | ||
| According to the UK government stats, by the way, it's not me making it up, right? | ||
| A third of all national referrals to the prevent strategy, which is the anti-extremism strategy the government has in place, are from far-right, anti-Muslim extremist referrals. | ||
| Most are still from jihadist referrals. | ||
| But they are the fastest rising. | ||
| The anti-Muslim ones are the fastest rising referrals, even if they're not up there yet with the jihadists. | ||
| And you put that into context of the fact that Europe has a history of institutionalizing, on a state scale, genocide against minorities, whether it's the Holocaust or the Bosnia genocide. | ||
| You can't understate the dangers of us needing to be wary of this fast-rising problem, you know? | ||
| So in that sense, Pierce, yeah. | ||
| Thank you, Pierce, for being worried about this. | ||
| That's what he was trying to do. | ||
| And that's why I use the word confusion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| Because you don't do that, you don't want to do that, Defend Muslims from anti-Muslim bigotry, right? | ||
| And why is that important? | ||
| With everything we just said, right? | ||
| You don't want to do that by reinforcing blasphemy codes. | ||
| So the moment for me that was a low point in that interview is that Tommy's holding up a copy of the Qur'an and Pierce is saying, put that book down and show respect. | ||
| Now, in other words, Pierce is saying don't blaspheme, because legally and morally there's nothing wrong with holding a book up in the air like that, unless you're going to say you're being blasphemous. | ||
| And that was for me a low point, that we cannot, to challenge anti-Muslim bigotry, we cannot reinforce blasphemy codes. | ||
| Because then what we're doing is reinforcing another form of bigotry, which is the Islamists going around murdering blasphemers in our own communities. | ||
| So there's got to be a way to do it, and that's my mantra. | ||
| This is the answer to the problem here right now. | ||
| No idea is above scrutiny, and no person is beneath dignity. | ||
| So what Pierce should have done is let Tommy criticise the Qur'an. | ||
| He's got every right to criticise the Qur'an. | ||
| Just like I've got every right to criticize Shakespeare. | ||
| It's a book, right? | ||
| He's got every right in a free and open society to say what he likes about this book he's holding up. | ||
| And for Pierce to show some respect is exactly the rhetoric that led to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. | ||
| We've got to be careful. | ||
| It also showed to me the phrase that Bill uses a lot, that a bunch of us have sort of used as well, which is the soft bigotry of low expectations. | ||
| That Piers was trying to be so moral and so virtuous that he was defending a set of ideas that would not do good things to him. | ||
| Of course that doesn't mean all the people who believe in it. | ||
| I mean, we've been through all this before. | ||
| But I think that's a good transition to Tommy, because you've had a bit of a history with Tommy. | ||
| I've had Tommy on the show and part of the reason I had him on the show was because it was after I had you on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
At that time you guys... Was it before or after I helped him leave the EDL? | |
| It was after. | ||
| So I think you guys were a little more in lockstep. | ||
| So basically you helped him leave the EDL. | ||
| You thought that there was... | ||
| Some fertile ground there to work together on some things. | ||
| Listen, when I see Tommy, and I'm not in Britain, but from what I can see from social media and things, I think basically he doesn't strike me as a bigot. | ||
| And I think he's basically trying, he's seen his society change in a way he doesn't like and he's trying Excuse me, he's trying to fight for something. | ||
| Now, I may be missing something, and what he did by showing up at your office and putting it on video, which creates a security situation and all that, I'm offering no defense of that whatsoever. | ||
| That being said, where are you guys at? | ||
| He called in before that incident, which I wish he hadn't have done, because the point is, I've got bigger fish to fry, so to come in, There are people who have called in live on my radio show and said, I had plans to assassinate you as a jihadist. | ||
| And, you know, thank you because I've changed. | ||
| It's been two years. | ||
| But come on. | ||
| Imagine how that feels. | ||
| I'm on a live radio show. | ||
| People calling and saying, we were actually, he said, I can make bombs and we had plans to kill you. | ||
| And he named Malala Yousafzai and me, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. | ||
| But we're the two in Britain. | ||
| And this is a guy from the UK. | ||
| In that climate, where people are being murdered on our streets for saying less than what I say, for Tommy to come into our Quilliam HQ with a camera, exposing our office to the world, because we didn't announce to anyone where our office was, you know, I just wish he hadn't have done that, because there was no need, I've got bigger fish to fry, there was no need to turn your guns on, if you're looking for allies from within the Muslim community to challenge Islamism, No better ally than Quilliam will you find. | ||
| There was no need to turn your guns on us. | ||
| Before that incident, he called into my radio show. | ||
| It was, again, a surprise call, like the assassination one was, right? | ||
| You never know what you're going to get on live radio. | ||
| Yeah, it's a live LBC call-in, isn't it? | ||
| So you don't know what you're going to get. | ||
| So he called in, and he used a different name, and he got through. | ||
| And I don't know why. | ||
| I don't filter the calls, my producers do. | ||
| People that work in radio know how these things work. | ||
| You get through to the producers, they filter the calls and give you the best ones. | ||
| There's lots of people calling in. | ||
| And sometimes people know the game, so they'll say something else to the producer. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And it's the producer's job to make sure that somebody's going to break the law, for example, on live radio. | ||
| There are legal responsibilities involved. | ||
| So he got through in the end, and I gave him a lot of time to speak. | ||
| And if you listen to that, on Quilliam's YouTube account, we uploaded the conversation. | ||
| And if you listen to that conversation, in that conversation, I conceded much of the substance of what Tommy was saying to me about. | ||
| It was just after the attacks, which attacks were they? | ||
| The Westminster attack. | ||
| Khalid Massoud, who attacked in Westminster before the Manchester attack and before the London Bridge attack and before the Finsbury Park mosque attack. | ||
| It was the first of those four. | ||
| Even as you say that, it's really getting hard to remember these things. | ||
| And that's just in four months. | ||
| So it was after the first one of those four attacks I've just listed, the Westminster | ||
| attack, Khalid Masood, jihadist, former associate of Al Mahajroon. | ||
| And I understand Tommy's anger, because he's from Luton, where Al Mahajroon made the base | ||
| of their activity and ruined his hometown as a result. | ||
| So he called in and he said, everything I've been saying about the Luton mosque is correct. | ||
| They advertise this guy as their spokesperson. | ||
| And all of that, I not only said, yeah, you're right, Tommy, 100%, I said, if politicians are listening right now, on this point, Tommy is correct. | ||
| I said that on my show. | ||
| And where I disagree with him, and I said, Tommy, after the Westminster attack, you were standing outside Westminster on one of your live podcasts, and you were saying, Muslims have been attacking us for 1,400 years. | ||
| And that's where I'm saying, look, Tommy, you've gotta just, you know, Muslims have been attacking you for 1,400 years. | ||
| My grandfather fought with the British Army, you know, in World War II. | ||
| You've got to just be a bit... There are people that died, Muslims died in World War II fighting for Britain against Hitler. | ||
| So saying Muslims have been fighting us for 1,400 years is feeding into that clash of civilizations, civil war rhetoric that the jihadists want to create, you know. | ||
| So I just said on the thing, and your viewers can Watch that clip. | ||
| We'll link to it down below. | ||
| And I said, Tommy, just that rhetoric, I said, I put my credibility on the line within my own Muslim communities to help you leave the EDL because I believe that humans can change, and I changed, and I want others to change. | ||
| And I've never claimed to have de-radicalized Tommy. | ||
| A lot of, like, even on the Muslim side, I say, Magid claimed to de-radicalize him, | ||
| I'm looking at him now, and it's like, I never made that claim. | ||
| What we said was we rendered the EDL leaderless, which was a good thing. | ||
| And Tommy said it was a good thing because they'd been infiltrated by neo-Nazis, | ||
| which is the reason he said he left them, right? | ||
| What I wish he'd done a bit more of is, people often say, Magid, you left HT, | ||
| and people are giving you a second chance. | ||
| He's left the idea, why can't he have a second chance? | ||
| And what I wish he'd done a bit more of, and I hope he still does, because he's got a lot of good to contribute, right? | ||
| I left HT and turned my guns on my former ideology. | ||
| The reason I left was that Islamism, I believed, had come to represent the very beast That I wanted to fight when I first joined them. | ||
| Racism, discrimination. | ||
| I realize Islamism is all of those things. | ||
| So I turned my guns back on Islamism and ever since leaving that group have been fighting the very reason I left Hizb ut-Tahrir. | ||
| Tommy said he left the EDL because it had been infiltrated by neo-Nazis. | ||
| So even he acknowledges there's a problem. | ||
| Otherwise he wouldn't have left the EDL which was his own group. | ||
| So I wish he'd done a bit more. | ||
| to turn his guns on that Neo-Nazism. | ||
| And that's where, he's going to watch this, and I hope he does a bit more of that. | ||
| But on the Pierce thing, and he's probably seen my tweet saying this, Pierce was wrong to tell him to put the Qur'an down and show some respect and shout at him in that way. | ||
| Everybody has the right, I'm lifting a cup right now, you've got the right to lift a book. | ||
| I mean, come on guys! | ||
| You're holding a book in the air? | ||
| How is that even, even if one were to believe in blasphemy, how is that even blasphemous? | ||
| To hold the Quran up in the air, is that modern day blasphemy now? | ||
| Yeah, and that's the irony that I think in some ways people like Piers in this specific instance, they strengthen the bad side more than, certainly more than Tommy was in that moment because Tommy's sitting there going, do you know about what Have you read what's in here? | ||
| Have you read it? | ||
| And it's obvious that Piers hasn't. | ||
| And then the average person that's watching that, I'm not talking about, not even the mainstream Muslim, just the average person anywhere that are watching that goes, it's pretty clear who doesn't know what's going on in that book. | ||
| And it's pretty clear who does. | ||
| And that's why this conversation has just been leveled in so many different ways. | ||
| And that's the confusion. | ||
| And you know, we are, all of us, fumbling and stumbling and mumbling our way through this debate, right? | ||
| All of us. | ||
| And that's why I said, allow room for human error, human evolution, and humanity on a human level. | ||
| Meaning humans, one-on-one, are human beings and treat them still with respect, even if you discount the human error and the human evolution and you still disagree with somebody, they're still a human being. | ||
| And those three humans, right, just allow that to happen. | ||
| Because we're stumbling and mumbling and fumbling our way through this conversation, mistakes will be made. | ||
| It's new to all of us. | ||
| It's new. | ||
| It's a new conversation. | ||
| We're used to dealing with communism in the West. | ||
| We're used to dealing with fascism and Nazism. | ||
| This is the first time we're dealing with this one. | ||
| So mistakes will be made. | ||
| People are confused. | ||
| They don't want to do the wrong thing. | ||
| They don't know what's the right thing to do. | ||
| They don't know. | ||
| So Pierce made a mistake. | ||
| Tommy's made mistakes. | ||
| I've made mistakes. | ||
| And all of us, if we recognize that we've got to get through this together, that's what we've got to do, then we will each advise and correct each other on the way. | ||
| And as I said earlier, Tommy can stay on the right wing all he wants. | ||
| I'm not there and I won't vote for that. | ||
| But he can stay on the right wing all he wants. | ||
| There's room for improvement. | ||
| Pierce used to edit one of the left-wing tabloids in the UK, The Mirror, right? | ||
| I don't know where he is these days, but he can stay wherever he is. | ||
| I think it depends on the day. | ||
| He can stay wherever he is, but there's room, again, for improvement, and as there is with me, you know. | ||
| Yeah, well, as there is with me as well. | ||
| Clearly, evidently, you accuse me of planting a bomb here! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, yes, it just never ends. | |
| Well, first off, I really want to thank you for doing this. | ||
| We've already gone over an hour, and you're doing real time. | ||
| Are we out of time? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we can keep going for a little bit. | ||
| I mean, if it depends, I don't wanna like, I don't wanna ruin your show. | ||
| No, don't ruin my, I mean, this is it. | ||
| This is what I do. | ||
| This is a pure joy. | ||
| So you know what, I'll ask you one other thing and then I'll let you give a nice closing statement. | ||
| So along with that we're all fumbling through this and that new voices keep coming in and trying to figure out, we talked about this briefly right before we sat down, trying to figure out who we can trust and something. | ||
| So Imam Tawheedi, Tawheedi? | ||
| Tawheedi. | ||
| See, now you're being racist, Dave. | ||
| I can't win here. | ||
| So he has sort of burst onto the scene. | ||
| He's an Australian imam. | ||
| He's now verified on Twitter. | ||
| He went on my friend Lala Dagash's podcast. | ||
| He's done a bunch of other things. | ||
| And there seems to be a feeling right now that this is the hot new guy to come and reform Islam and talk about it from the inside and all this stuff. | ||
| Now, I was with our friend Faisal Syed Al-Muttar last night, and I said a lot of people want him. | ||
| Champion, Faisal Al-Muttar is a champ. | ||
| I love him, I just adore him. | ||
| But I was on. | ||
| We need to hear more of those voices, by the way. | ||
| I would say this, I'm biased, and let me put my cards on the table. | ||
| Liberal ex-Muslims, Ali Rizvi, Faisal Al-Muttar, liberal ex-Muslims, because there are lots of different types of ex-Muslims, and so I'm saying my bias is liberalism, liberal ex-Muslim voices. | ||
| We need to champion them more. | ||
| Absolutely, and I will always offer them a seat. | ||
| But I said to Faisal last night, I said, you know, a lot of people want me to have him on the show, but he's so new to this, and I cannot sit here, I will not pretend, looking you directly in the eye, I will not pretend that I know every verse of the Qur'an, every in and out of every different a different sect and all those things. | ||
| That for me to have that conversation responsibly with someone who just got on the scene, | ||
| I don't know that I'm quite able to do it properly. | ||
| So Faisal has already offered if the three of us could do it maybe, | ||
| so maybe we'll do it that way. | ||
| But on the more broad sense, A, do you know anything about him? | ||
| But B, what about people that just sort of burst on to you? | ||
| So I was able to speak to you about Pierce and Tommy because I've met them, spoken to them, I know them. | ||
| I don't know Imam Tahriri. | ||
| I've never met him. | ||
| I've never heard of him. | ||
| Until about somebody, people, obviously lots of people ask me about him. | ||
| I've never heard of him until about a month ago. | ||
| So, I can't speak about someone I don't know, who I've never met, who I've never even discussed with. | ||
| In real life, even on social media, I've never exchanged a word with him. | ||
| And so, what I can say though, not knowing this person, And not wanting to put words and attribute motivations and intentions to somebody who I genuinely don't know anything about. | ||
| What I can speak about is, on a broader level, in answering your question, how a sign of the success of some of what we're doing and the need for a reform discourse within Muslim communities and an anti-Islamist discourse. | ||
| And I want to get to that, by the way. | ||
| The difference between reformers The difference between reforming Islam, challenging Islamism, Muslim apologetics, there's a bit of a confusion. | ||
| What I can say is a sign of the success of this work is that there will be new voices coming along. | ||
| Whether they're jumping on the bandwagon or not, we don't know. | ||
| I don't know this guy. | ||
| No, so I can't comment there. | ||
| I assume the best of intentions. | ||
| I hope for any fellow human being. | ||
| But the sign of the success of this work is that there will be new voices coming on. | ||
| So that's a positive first. | ||
| Let's bank that. | ||
| That's in the bank that, look, new voices, people wanting to talk about this subject can only be a good thing. | ||
| And we'll all fumble and mumble and stumble our way through it together as we just agreed. | ||
| Secondly, I would say another thing, a word of caution. | ||
| I've been doing this for long enough now. | ||
| We all know each other. | ||
| And, you know, with unknown entities that emerge, and again, let's not personalize it with Imam al-Turhidi, but anyone that emerges in the future even. | ||
| We've just got to be, we've got to remember, and I'm going to give you two examples from two different sects, from within the Sunni and the Shia Islamic sects. | ||
| Just so we understand that, you know, it's often complicated to know where somebody's coming from, right? | ||
| Within the Sunni Islamic denomination, There is a community within South Asia called the Barelvis. | ||
| The Barelvis are a very ultra-conservative, socially, ultra-conservative, strictly religious Sufi sect within the Sunni denomination of Islam in South Asia in particular. | ||
| That's where they are. | ||
| And they are the default majority in countries like Pakistan. | ||
| The default village Islam will be Barelvi Islam. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now these guys hate the Islamists. | ||
| I speak a bit about this in my dialogue with Sam Harris in Islam and the Future of Tolerance. | ||
| These Breivik guys hate Islamists. | ||
| They hate Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan. | ||
| They despise the Islamists. | ||
| They hate them more than they'd hate a non-practicing Muslim. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And I know this. | ||
| This is my community. | ||
| I know it inside out. | ||
| If I was just an ordinary non-devout Muslim, the Breiviks would still have no problem with me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the reason for that hatred? | ||
| Because I think the average person listening to you would go, wait a minute, if they're buying all that, then aren't they Islamists in and of themselves? | ||
| They see Islamism as an innovation in religious terms, a heresy, right? | ||
| And so it would be very easy for a Barelvi voice to appear to the outside world as a reforming liberal, secular, you know, and this is where I'm going with this, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you didn't know where that person was coming from, it would be easy to assume that because of everything they're saying against Islamists in public, that they are with you. | ||
| But you've got to know, this community inside out, to know that the one area that you will lose the Brevi on, and this is why I would lose them, is because I tweeted out a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. | ||
| The one thing the Brevis cannot tolerate is blasphemy. | ||
| They are Sufis who love the Prophet in a mystical, spiritual way, and that love has translated into a passion. | ||
| Into a passion, right? | ||
| And so it was the Brelvi community that murdered the governor of Punjab, not the community, voices from within the community, who murdered the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer in Pakistan, who merely called for reforming the blasphemy law. | ||
| His own bodyguard shot him to death nine times, and his own bodyguard was from the Brelevi sect that I've just mentioned. | ||
| And these guys would die fighting the Islamists. | ||
| And yet, on blasphemy, some of them have turned into murderers, and many of them now are singing the praises of that murderer. | ||
| So I give this example to show you that you've got to know the community inside out to know where a voice is coming from. | ||
| Now take the second example here from a different sect, the Shia sect. | ||
| There is an equivalent. | ||
| Let's take Iraq, where there are many Shia. | ||
| I think 60% of Iraq is Shia. | ||
| There's the Sistani-style Shia in Iraq who are devoutly, avowedly secular and therefore will openly criticize the Iranian regime. | ||
| But you gotta understand, these are still ultra-conservative religious people. | ||
| And so their critique of Islamism in public, even Shia Islamism, in the form of Iran and Hezbollah, isn't the whole story. | ||
| And so all I'm saying, and as I repeat, I don't know Imam Tawhidi. | ||
| All I'm saying is we've got to understand the internal dynamics here to know where voices are coming from. | ||
| So I'm so glad you explained it that way, because that's exactly why I was having hesitancy here. | ||
| If Faisal will do it, I'll gladly do it. | ||
| Because at some level, we all can only learn so much about everything. | ||
| And just when you have a new person, it's just a new X Factor. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But it's a good thing new voices are emerging. | ||
| It's always good because that means the conversation is moving forward. | ||
| What was the part that you just wanted to get back to? | ||
| I don't know if you have time for this. | ||
| I have as much time as you want. | ||
| I wanted to give you a chance for a nap before the real time. | ||
| I'm up until 6am this morning, but I was just saying there's a confusion around, people are asking me increasingly, how do we know the difference between a reforming Muslim and an apologist? | ||
| And what is the difference between Muslim fundamentalism and Islamism, because is Islamism really Islam? | ||
| And there's a bit of a confusion around these three areas. | ||
| And so I said I'm happy to speak. | ||
| No, yeah, let's do it. | ||
| Have I just told you what's awesome? | ||
| No, you asked your own question. | ||
| That's great, good. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'll just sit back, have fun. | |
| That was a great trick, a great little trick you did there. | ||
| You dropped the hint, then you asked yourself a question. | ||
| I'm gonna answer my question. | ||
| But actually it's a nice segue from the last thing. | ||
| I think it's important for people to know this because increasingly as more and more Reform Muslim voices will emerge, and some of them will be jumping on the bandwagon and others will be genuine, we've got to know this difference. | ||
| We've got to know what is the difference between somebody who's attempting to engage in apologetics for Islam while using the language of reform, and somebody who's genuinely trying to reform this discourse. | ||
| Yeah, can we pause there for a second? | ||
| So in my opinion, but please challenge me if you think I'm incorrect, I would argue Linda Sarsour is in that camp, the first camp. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, again, I've never met her or spoken to her. | ||
| I know she's been attacking me, I've never spoken to her. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, that's an example. | ||
| So somebody, for example, who says Islam has always been feminist and will be feminist, and there's no problem with FGM, it's an African problem, you know some of the stuff I'm referring to. | ||
| Indonesia's got the greatest rights in the world for Muslims and non-Muslims. | ||
| That kind of discussion, right? | ||
| Because a reformer will also end up having to come to the position that Islam, keep in mind, if they're a reforming Muslim, they haven't left the religion. | ||
| So, in the end, for them to be a reforming liberal Muslim, they're going to have to have come to the conclusion that Islam is compatible with feminism. | ||
| And so it's a beautiful example. | ||
| What is the difference between a reforming Muslim who comes to the conclusion that they've reconciled their Islam with feminism and an apologist who says Islam is feminist and always has been? | ||
| And how do we know the difference? | ||
| So lots of people have been asking me that. | ||
| That's why I thought it was important for me to elaborate. | ||
| Please do! | ||
| One of the most important things to know the difference. | ||
| I could probably just leave the room for a little while. | ||
| Please go, go, I just speak straight to the camera. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the most important things there in that, in recognizing that difference, | ||
| off from the get-go, is a reforming Muslim will begin by acknowledging | ||
| there's a problem. | ||
| And an apologist will pretend there isn't a problem and never has been. | ||
| And that's the key thing, first off, from the get-go. | ||
| A reforming Muslim will say, yes, there's a problem, not only in our communities, with not only the rise of Islamism, but also the rise of Muslim fundamentalism, and they're not the same thing. | ||
| They are related, but they're not the same thing. | ||
| So the Brevi example I gave, that's an example of Muslim fundamentalism. | ||
| They hate the Islamists, but they're still fundamentalists in their own way with blasphemy. | ||
| So, a reforming Muslim will acknowledge those two problems of Muslim fundamentalism and Islamism within the community, and will also acknowledge a problem with scripture. | ||
| From the get-go. | ||
| A reforming Muslim, if they don't acknowledge a problem with scripture, aren't reforming much, to be honest. | ||
| So a reforming Muslim will say, yes, we have problematic traditions. | ||
| Whether it's the Hadith that says whoever changes his religion, kill him. | ||
| It's there, it's in the scripture. | ||
| Or passages in the Quran that talk about lashing the fornicator, or chopping off the hand of the thief, and so on and so forth. | ||
| These are beating one's wife, which I recently challenged somebody to on my LBC show. | ||
| Quoting to them the Arabic. | ||
| It's clear. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| This is beat them. | ||
| Talking about what? | ||
| This is in the Qur'an. | ||
| So reforming will acknowledge there are problematic passages in the scripture. | ||
| And that there are problems in the community with how they view this scripture. | ||
| And then we'll begin attempting to reconcile and reform that discourse and say, now we acknowledge there's a problem, how do we fix it? | ||
| Whereas the apologist will not recognize a problem in the community, nor will the scripture, and will instead appropriate the language of social justice to conceal that problem with a view to diverting attention away to elsewhere. | ||
| What do you think the apologist is trying to do? | ||
| So when I hear Sarsour, or even Reza, who we sort of danced around without saying his name, but some of these people, but particularly Sarsour, I agree, it's now become this intersectional crazy thing with all the SJW stuff and all that, but what do you think she's really trying to do? | ||
| Advance the interests of Islam. | ||
| So that fundamentally is it. | ||
| It's obvious. | ||
| Because, no, it seems very obvious to me, but again, I try not to impugn everyone's intentions, but she, to me, it seems like she's a sheep in Islamist terms. | ||
| You can ask them a question, very simple. | ||
| You know, I'm known for asking these difficult-to-get-out-of-questions. | ||
| And they say, you know, do you care for, are you interested in advancing the interests of Islam? | ||
| You know, if somebody asked me that question, I'd be honest and say to you, I'm not religious! | ||
|
unidentified
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No! | |
| I don't even think there's a... I mean, it's the first time ever I'm going to be saying this on air. | ||
| So actually, people are giving us the grace of overextending time. | ||
| I'm going to hear now something for the first time. | ||
| I don't believe that there should be, is, or need be, in Muslim theological terms, a difference between Muslim and non-Muslim. | ||
| It no longer makes sense to me. | ||
| And what I mean by that is, historically, I'm meant to say that that Muslim is my brother and you're a non-Muslim. | ||
| He will always be and she will always be my brother and sister in Islam over you who's Dave, my friend, whatever, but they're my brothers in faith. | ||
| That distinction of even calling someone a Muslim and a non-Muslim is no longer relevant. | ||
| If indeed it ever was. | ||
| And what I mean by that is, you're a better human being than a Muslim who believes in blasphemy laws, in killing gays and whatever they believe in, right? | ||
| You're a better human being than that person. | ||
| So you're more my brother than they are, right? | ||
| And so I think it's important to put that out there. | ||
| So if you ask me, do I believe in furthering the interest of Islam? | ||
| You can see the answer there. | ||
| It's like, no, I believe in furthering the interest of humanity. | ||
| And Islam as a religion, as it was constructed by men, and furthering the interest of that is essentially furthering the interest of medievalism. | ||
| But this is what I believe apologists are interested in, furthering the interest of a medieval structure that ended up being called the religion of Islam. | ||
| And it's important to recognize that, because Sheikh Osama Hassan, who's at Quilliam as a reform imam, If you think about him, he's engaged in a theological debate. | ||
| And so the poor guy, he has no choice but to say, I've reconciled my religion with feminism. | ||
| Otherwise, by definition, he wouldn't be a reformer. | ||
| So we've got to give him that leeway to do that if we pragmatically recognize the importance of the Reform Project while recognizing he's no Linda Sarsour or, you know, personalize it, forgive me, whoever the other person is. | ||
| He's no that person, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hope that makes it clear for people. | ||
| I thought that was important because you will get more and more people saying, yeah, they believe in reform, they're liberal Muslims, and we just need to have an understanding as to how to begin to filter through that. | ||
| Well, I think what you're doing extremely well is that you're taking your logic to the end. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You're trying not to get to a place where you're going to be on stage one day and someone is going to go, well, Majid, I hear you, I hear you, I hear you, we've gotten here, but now you have this unanswerable question, and I don't sense that with you. | ||
|
unidentified
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I sense that you've laid the ground for... I'm going to be honest with people, you know? | |
| That's the important thing, again. | ||
| The key thing is to be honest in these conversations because, you know, people... | ||
| People are seeing and they're noticing a lack of honesty, and it's refreshing for people to have a Muslim who's gonna speak openly and honestly about this stuff. | ||
| All right, I'm gonna let you go. | ||
| I know you could do more. | ||
| Look, I have a feeling we're gonna do this again. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I think so, yeah. | ||
| We'll do this again, either here or in London. | ||
| But we'll ask your viewers to watch, if they want more, watch Bill Maher's Realtime tonight. | ||
| Oh, watch Realtime tonight, and we're going out to dinner with Sam tonight. | ||
| Can we not talk about Islam? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, let's do that, yeah. | ||
| Well, you're not a basketball guy, right? | ||
| No, I can talk about music, films. | ||
| Oh, Star Wars! | ||
| We'll do Star Wars. | ||
| Lots of stuff. | ||
| American sports, forgive me, but I don't know what I'm talking about there. | ||
| All right, well, thank you for doing this. | ||
| This was totally last second, too, and you showed up. | ||
| Watch out for a major announcement on Bill Maher's show. | ||
| Oh, I saw you tease a little something. | ||
| Major, no, I'm surprised you didn't ask me about it. | ||
| Well, I was gonna say no. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm not gonna tell you, but you didn't ask me, so I didn't even need to say no. | |
| You asked yourself the right questions, and I forgot the questions that I should ask you. | ||
| All right, really, it's been a pleasure. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| And catch Majid tonight on Realtime, which is 10 p.m. | ||
| Eastern on HBO, if you haven't cut the cord yet, or maybe you have HBO now, or whatever it is. | ||
| And this was a crazy week here. | ||
| We did three live streams. | ||
| We did a regular show and it is fully because of you guys hooking us up on Patreon and supporting what we do. |
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